Hello,

I want to build a ‘manager’ style game. A bit like Football Manager but for business. It would be 2D with limited graphics but the game needs to simulate how variables evolve (i.e. money made) as the player takes actions.

I have no game development experience. I have downloaded Unity and a, looking at their tutorials but I don't even know what ‘type’ of things to learn. I have no interest in learning about 3D graphics, shooters or anything like that.

Can anyone give me some keywords to search for so I can learn the skills I need to make this game?

Thanks,

KO

Unity is probably not a good choice for a management style game, because those games rely a lot on complex UI, and Unity is not good for complex UI. That's not to say that it can't work, just that you make your life harder that way. It might help if you can find a 3rd party asset to purchase that would help with the UI element, but I don't know of one that I could recommend.

Sadly, there isn't one single ‘best route’ for how you should go about this - it depends on several factors:

• Do you care about being able to sell the game or not?
• Do you need the game to run in a web browser?
• Do you have any programming experience?
• Just how ‘limited’ can the graphics be?

And that's just for the technical side. For the design side, you're going to have to think about how to model the processes in your game. It might be a good idea to look at board games, war games, and tabletop roleplaying games, as they have clear rules published that cover how events are generated and resolved. It's not a very popular genre in terms of how many people work on games like this, so there isn't much published onlione about writing rulesets for them.

Kylotan said:

Unity is probably not a good choice for a management style game, because those games rely a lot on complex UI, and Unity is not good for complex UI. That's not to say that it can't work, just that you make your life harder that way. It might help if you can find a 3rd party asset to purchase that would help with the UI element, but I don't know of one that I could recommend.

Sadly, there isn't one single ‘best route’ for how you should go about this - it depends on several factors:

• Do you care about being able to sell the game or not?
• Do you need the game to run in a web browser?
• Do you have any programming experience?
• Just how ‘limited’ can the graphics be?

And that's just for the technical side. For the design side, you're going to have to think about how to model the processes in your game. It might be a good idea to look at board games, war games, and tabletop roleplaying games, as they have clear rules published that cover how events are generated and resolved. It's not a very popular genre in terms of how many people work on games like this, so there isn't much published onlione about writing rulesets for them.

Thanks @kylotan .

Responding to your questions…

• I need the game to be sellable but not to mass market. I can position this as part of a research project so I just need to ‘sell’ the idea to a few people.
• Running a browser would be fine to start
• I am average with HTML, CSS, Java and my background is data so I can use SQL, R and Python (not sure how comprehensive the backend for this game needs to be).
• I think the overall graphics should be very limited. I want the UX to be the main feature, i.e. numbers and dashboards, as opposed to characters.

Interesting that you mention board games. I have a friend who owns a successful board game company and he has offered to help me with my rules. I'm also building an excel mock up for the data changes.

I agree re: lack of online documentation on this although I was hoping this was due to my lack of knowledge about keywords to search.

Do you happen to know which engine might be better to build the game?

Thanks for your previous response, and for any advice you can provide going forward.

@knockoff

Can you clarify - do you intend to sell the game to end users, or just to make it as a research project? The reason this matters is because there are some approaches which are good to use but awkward to distribute, or which might be too easy to pirate or hack. This won't matter if you're not distributing to the public.

The question about running in the browser would not be a “to start” thing - it's about whether you need it there in the end, or not.

I don't know a good engine for the type of game you're describing. I think most people are making such games from a very low level, writing their own UI framework, usually using C++ or C#. But that's not a good use of your time.

You could consider coming from the other direction - maybe just picking a normal desktop application development framework, and writing the game in that. If your graphics are not demanding then you don't need most of what a game engine offers.

GeneralJist said:

@knockoff I sent you a pm.

Sending you a response.

Kylotan said:

@knockoff

Can you clarify - do you intend to sell the game to end users, or just to make it as a research project? The reason this matters is because there are some approaches which are good to use but awkward to distribute, or which might be too easy to pirate or hack. This won't matter if you're not distributing to the public.

The question about running in the browser would not be a “to start” thing - it's about whether you need it there in the end, or not.

I don't know a good engine for the type of game you're describing. I think most people are making such games from a very low level, writing their own UI framework, usually using C++ or C#. But that's not a good use of your time.

You could consider coming from the other direction - maybe just picking a normal desktop application development framework, and writing the game in that. If your graphics are not demanding then you don't need most of what a game engine offers.

It could be a future goal to try and release it on the Apple or Playstore but in the short term I'd rather just make it. If there is any revenue to generate, it will be from people sponsoring the overall project.

Unfortunately I still don't even know what to Google. If I look for a freelancer or agency, will it be enough to ask if they work in C++ C# etc? I feel like that is too vague.

Thank you for your patience and attempts to help.

@knockoff Maybe have a look at Feathers UI. No engine, just use VScode (or your favorite) editor. It uses Haxe, which is like ActionScript,/Typescript, and very easy if you know some Java. The advantage is the extremely easy cross compilation. Test on HTML, build for any platform.
Then just play around with the examples, everything is open source so you can alter the widgets to your needs.

About the actual game implementation, probably use a state machine (fsm). A quick google gave this.